We created coral reef structures by cutting out various staghorn hard coral templates and attaching them together. The students then painted them a colour of their choice – after seeing how the corals look in nature. The next step is to add salt crystals to the structure to react with ammonia so that the coral looks like the polyps of real coral.

The pieces students create that can’t be hung from the net could be displayed around the room. We talked about how coral grows and that they are in fact animals not plants. Corals have algae as their “best friends” and it’s the algae that eat and digest food for corals.

The students are really happy to finish their crayfish from last week. As they work on their projects, the students are chatting away to each other and talking about music they love.